


How to Lose Friends (a guide to terrifying the ones you love)

by JackHawksmoor



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: F/M, Identity Reveal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-05-28 15:31:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19397053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackHawksmoor/pseuds/JackHawksmoor
Summary: Hell doesn't run well under a good man. It's sort of a complement, if you ignore the bit about the end of the world





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You don't see much 3rd person omniscient in fanfiction. I've never done it before, but it sounded fun, and I've done enough fanfiction at this point to want to screw around with it a little bit. Lemony Snicket is entirely responsible for the weirdo narrator.

Ella could see that Chloe and Lucifer were already inside her lab waiting for her, heads together, talking quietly. Chloe and Lucifer were currently having a very painful conversation. Ella did not know this, so the sight of the two of them cheered her up immediately. If Chloe and Lucifer were there, Ella figured it would probably be an interesting day.

She was right; It would be an interesting day. However, this was something of an understatement, in the same sense as one might say ‘the Pacific Ocean is a bit of water west of Los Angeles’.

Ella and Chloe were what Ella called solid bros. Chloe would have agreed with her, but only after the term was explained to her. One of the reasons Chloe was so likable was the fact that she had such an abundance of kindness that she had to carry the excess around in buckets, and kept sloshing it on people. Ella personally found her to be an enjoyable challenge to corrupt; On her own, Chloe was about as uptight as a gymnast’s ass. In the pornography starring all of Ella's friends, Chloe would definitely be the reserved, sexy librarian.

Lucifer would without a doubt direct that pornography. As a result, everyone on set would have the time of their lives, and the result would be a movie that was not legal to show in public theaters. Lucifer would have agreed with her, and wouldn't need anything explained. A big reason Ella liked Lucifer was due to the fact that his internal dictionary had no entry for ‘weird’. He had no ‘too weird’. He only had various shades of amusing, annoying, sexy, ‘Chloe’, and ‘fuck you’.

When Ella opened her door, she immediately wished she had knocked. There was no reason for anyone to expect Ella to knock on the door of her own lab, but as soon as she saw them, she picked up the vibe that knocking would definitely have been better than just strolling in on whatever conversation they had been having. Both Chloe and Lucifer had similar thoughts. It was an extremely awkward meeting of minds.

“Hey, guys,” Ella said, more carefully than usual. She spoke as though she were talking to a slightly discouraged puppy attempting to climb stairs. “What’s up?” She was assuming they were there to talk about murder. Not murders Ella had committed, though she’d thought about it once or twice when the guy with the drum set moved in next door. Strictly work related murders.

In a general sense, Chloe and Lucifer were talking about murder, but more the kind of murder that involved the entire human race. No one would be left alive to investigate, so it was not work related. Lucifer had his hand at Chloe’s back, as though he was trying to protect her from something. He wanted very badly to do that. However, Lucifer wasn’t actually able to protect anyone he loved from pretty much anything at the moment, which was part of the problem. Ella had interrupted a pretty heavy conversation.

“Miss Lopez,” Lucifer said, suspecting he sounded suspiciously uneasy. He glanced furtively at Chloe, expecting her to take the lead. He had an automatic instinct to do this, given that she had been in charge of their partnership pretty much from day one. That instinct was tripping both of them up, given that Lucifer knew 10,000 times more about everything to do with their situation than she did. Lucifer hadn't figured that out yet.

Chloe did not notice him looking to her for an indication on how to behave. Chloe was preoccupied with an unpleasant truth about herself that she had only recently discovered in regards to their problem; She was not as strong as she had always thought she was. She insisted that she was fine. She was not fine. Chloe did not know that she was being unnecessarily hard on herself. If she had known, she probably would be a lot closer to 'fine' than she currently was.

Lucifer was much better than Chloe at being a wreck over a bad situation. He had practice. He did not have practice loving someone he had to hurt. Lucifer needed her to be ok with a level of desperation that would have alarmed Chloe if she’d understood the full extent of it. Lucifer was, as far as relationships were concerned, kind of a dumbass.

Ella got a good look at Chloe’s face, and Ella’s eyes widened. They both realized more or less simultaneously that Chloe was crying a little.

“Oh, buddy…” Ella said, instantly opening her arms for a hug.

Chloe shied away from it. “Sorry,” Chloe said, embarrassed in the way most adults were when caught having inconvenient emotions. “I’m just gonna go get a coffee.” 

She left in a manner that made it quite clear to both Ella and Lucifer that she was not coming back for a while. Ella had a strong suspicion that she was going to have a cry in the ladies’ room.

Lucifer stared after Chloe as if she’d reached into his chest and given his heart a karate chop. He looked frazzled and worn out, like someone who hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week. This was because he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week. 

When the door closed behind her, Ella turned to Lucifer, ready to demand an explanation. Ella assumed the issue had something to do with Lucifer’s recent absence. She was correct, but not in the way she thought.

Ella saw the expression on Lucifer’s face, and stopped dead. She had not had the opportunity to have a conversation with him since his return, mostly due to the randomness of conflicting schedules. This was the first time since before he disappeared that Ella had a chance to really look at him, to see what was going on with him, as a friend would. She regretted that lapse now.

Ordinarily Lucifer took an extraordinary amount of care with his appearance, to the point where it was possible for his friends to judge the state of his mental and emotional health by how neatly he was put together. On the ‘Emotional Scale of Snappy Dressing’, Lucifer was hovering somewhere around a 3. Lucifer’s hair looked like it had been combed by a lawnmower. He was very obviously wearing a suit he had slept in.

“Lucifer,” Ella said, the whole of her heart in the word. “What happened?”

Lucifer took a long moment to run his fingers through his hair and wipe at his eyes. It did not improve anything, but Lucifer managed to make eye contact afterwards. He noticed how alarmed Ella was. It would have been an excellent time to tell her a clever lie. 

Lucifer had not told a lie in thousands of years.

He let out a breath of laughter, utterly exhausted. “You wouldn’t understand,” Lucifer said, with an unhappy smile. It was a reasonable thing to believe.

As was her custom, Ella moved in to hug him. She expected him to stiffen or lean away, as usual. Both Ella and Lucifer knew on an unspoken level that he rather liked the fact that she kept doing it. Ella had noticed that Lucifer tended to linger confusedly in her lab whenever she failed to hug him hello, as though the day could not proceed without it. She did not know it, but whenever she was out sick, Lucifer would come into her lab and frown at it as if it were hiding her somewhere. 

His arms came up around her, his fingers very light against her back. Lucifer looked down at the top of her head and let out half a breath. It wasn’t a laugh; It was a brief, bitter acknowledgement of a capricious and uncaring universe. 

His judgement was slightly off; He had a bias that sprung from daddy issues. The universe, entirely separate from God, cared a great deal. The universe was playing dice with God, and was up about 20 dollars. It felt pretty good about itself. 

In an exceedingly small corner of that happier-than-usual universe, Ella stepped back from Lucifer and looked him up and down.

“All right,” Ella said. “Let’s have it.” She grabbed her other stool and dragged it over beside Lucifer. He watched her with a certain amount of trepidation. This was sensible, given the huge amount of space between his problem and her ability to understand it.

She gave him a slightly chiding ‘big brother’ punch in the arm. “Tell me what’s up, right now.” 

Ella did not understand that this would either go very badly, or be a complete waste of time. There was a good deal of evidence to support that opinion, enough that if Lucifer ever wrote two books, the second book could be titled ‘How to Lose Friends (a guide to terrifying the ones you love)’. The first book would be a sex guide.

Lately, to his relief, Lucifer had been able to write addendums to several chapters of ‘How to Lose Friends’, but he was not keen to push his luck.

“There’s no point, Miss Lopez.” He tilted his head at her, giving her a mildly exasperated look. “I’m afraid this is a problem that’s a bit beyond your ability to suspend disbelief.” His voice was regretful.

Lucifer had wasted a lot of time over the years telling his friends the truth and having it dismissed as fantasy. He was patient with them, a facet of his personality that had grown from scratch, starting from the moment his feet had hit the sand in Los Angeles. A lot of things about him had started to change in that moment. Lucifer hadn’t realized it at the time, but Los Angeles had an almost magical ability to turn the high and mighty into regular people.

That was actually part of Lucifer’s problem; He was now, essentially, ‘regular people’. 

Ella pressed her lips together and twisted her mouth thoughtfully. She was now officially considering this conversation ‘devil stuff’. Ella folded her arms. “Pretend I believe you, then.” She held up a hand to stop him from commenting. “Pretend I believe you, give me the cliffsnotes on your problem, and I can try to weigh in.” 

Lucifer gave her a hesitant look. He was thinking of the look in Chloe’s eyes when she’d first seen his devil face. He was thinking he couldn’t really handle that kind of thing today. “I don’t know that this is something you’ll want to hear.”

It was something no one wanted to hear. However, even if Ella had believed Lucifer, she might have insisted he tell her anyway, but only because she was always ready to throw down for her friends.

“Come on, dude,” she said, her tone of voice threatening to cross over into ‘nine year old who wanted an ice cream cone’ territory. 

“You’re my friend,” she added stubbornly, “and that means if you need help, I’m your girl. Lay it on me, and we’ll try to figure this out.”

Lucifer was somewhat pessimistic, with good reason. “All right,” he replied doubtfully. He sighed. “I’ve been here too long,” he began, as if he was saying ‘I have to take my heart out and eat it’. 

It was a grim start to the conversation. It got worse. He told a brief story that was utterly insane, but neatly filled in several things Ella had been thinking about that made no sense, like weird cult priests and liters of blood left on the ground while the bodies got up and walked away. It was not a nice story. 

After a while, Ella thought Lucifer was winding down, that the worst was already over with. To her, it seemed like a bad story with a happy ending. It would have been lovely if she was right.

“So,” Lucifer said, spreading his hands as if he was summing everything up, “someone has to be there to rule, or the demons will come back and make...well,” he lifted his chin and raised his eyebrows, “hell on earth, so to speak.” 

Lucifer shook his head, his eyes unfocused and strange. At that moment he was thinking of ash and heat and other, darker things that did not belong anywhere near Ella Lopez.

“Wow,” Ella said. “That’s...a lot.” She stopped herself from saying something doubtful. In this exercise, she was pretending to believe him. “But hey, you came back. From hell. That’s good, right? Wait, is that good?”

Lucifer laughed a little. “I didn’t come back because I wanted to. I came back because I had to.” He rubbed his forehead with the flat of his hand. “There’s something...wrong with me.” Lucifer sounded as if he wasn’t sure of his word choice. His expression was dark. “I’m not able to be what I need to be to do the job. I don’t know if it’s the time I spent here, or Chloe...” He spoke her name with a softness and affection that said in big letters ‘it was definitely Chloe’.

What had actually changed him from the devil he used to be was a combination of factors: His own reflections on his problems, Chloe, Dr. Linda, and the city of Los Angeles. Lucifer had actually done most of it on his own. Chloe had not made him love her. He’d decided to do that all by himself. 

Lucifer did not lie, but he was very capable of deceiving himself.

He looked at Ella, almost pleading with her, as if she had some authority to forgive him. “I can’t run hell it the way it needs to be run. I don’t have it in me anymore. It’s only a matter of time before the demons realize that,” he hesitated, his expression painful, “and then it’s the same problem again; They run wild, and people die. I have to break myself, somehow. I have to be what I was, but…” he stopped for a long moment, looking haunted.

“I don’t want to,” He said finally. He gave her a helpless look. “I’m not even sure that I can.”

Once Lucifer arrived back on earth, he had gone almost immediately to his therapist’s office and asked her to help him do just that, preferably before the end of the day. The words ‘change me back’ might have been spoken. Dr. Linda had to explain to him more than once that therapy didn’t work like that. He had been as desperate as Linda had ever seen him, and that was saying something.

Lucifer did not look well. Ella did not feel well.

Ella was getting a tight feeling in her chest. She was realizing that when he said that she wouldn’t like to hear this story, he had seriously not been fucking around. 

Lucifer began talking as if Ella was not in the room. It was a conversation he’d started having with himself somewhere around day 5 of his first week back in hell, which in hell terms felt like roughly ten thousand years. The demons had not been privy to this conversation, but given his behavior, they started getting suspicious of him around day 6. He figured he had maybe a day and a half, earth time, before they tried something. He couldn’t be king of hell if he was dead.

When Lucifer talked to himself, he did not speak kindly. He talked to himself like he was both trying to hurt himself and stunned at feeling the pain at the same time. It was not pleasant to watch. 

“I look at the people in hell,” Lucifer said, “and I know that they’re supposed to deserve it. Most of them do.” Lucifer smiled to himself with a faint spark of satisfaction. “Some of them really, really do.”

“But,” Lucifer continued, his face clouding with an almost childish kind of confusion, “some of them don’t deserve it _enough_. They don’t deserve to be punished in the way they are. I knew people here in LA,” he said the last bit with more force, “that did worse and didn’t deserve that kind of punishment. The crime doesn’t matter in hell, the only thing that matters is what you get for it.” 

He hesitated, and said the thing he had been quietly thinking to himself for a very, very long time. “I sat there for so long, after Dad cast me out, thinking I was better because I didn’t deserve to be there. But that’s just another lie I told myself. We’re all trapped in hell together, being endlessly punished whether we truly deserve it or not.” 

He shook his head with a genuinely vicious look on his face. 

“I’m no better than they are.” Lucifer snarled the words out. “And when I pick up a knife, I’m worse.”

It was an impressive piece of emotional honesty that he would not have been capable of facing before his stint in Los Angeles. If Dr. Linda had been there, she would have been proud of him.

She was not there, and neither was Chloe, who would have understood. There was just Ella, who had never seen Lucifer look genuinely vicious in her life.

“When is it enough?” Lucifer said then, in a tone of voice that said quite clearly that any answer other than ‘right now’ was pretty damned unacceptable.

The answer to that question was actually ‘hundreds of trillions of years from now’. It was not a good question for anyone to ask themselves. God had created kindness accidentally. That was also not a particularly good thought to dwell on. 

No one but the universe realized that the answer to that question was not immutable. The universe was currently beating God at dice as badly as anyone had ever beaten God at anything. They were debating the possibility of God putting up the universe itself as a bet on the next roll, in which case the odds were good that Lucifer and Chloe and everyone everywhere would be under new management, with a significantly less soul-crushing employee handbook. God had not realized that in order to play, the universe was the one who had to make the dice. 

As they played, Ella Lopez was having a crisis. There were several key pieces of information she had that would have clued Lucifer in on how this conversation was likely to go, if he’d known about them. These pieces of information included the fact that Ella valued emotional truth, and not only had Lucifer’s speech been genuine and terrifying, it also included the caveat that Chloe was currently crying in the bathroom over it. 

A less subjective truth was that she had been finding Lucifer’s fingerprints and shoe prints and weirder things that pointed his way at crime scenes for years. Some of these prints were in extremely improbable places. He'd even done one or two impossible things in front of her. Also, unlike anyone else who regularly interacted with Lucifer, Ella had read a lot of comic books. She was very fond of Batman, even though he beat up criminals and scared people into confessing to crimes and was generally very emotionally dense all the time. She’d been throwing Lucifer’s improbable fingerprints in the trash as long as she’d been finding them.

Lucifer looked up with a guilty start. He had forgotten Ella was there, which was both rude and unwise, given the circumstances. She was standing silently, her eyes filled with tears.

“Miss Lopez,” Lucifer said, his voice startled and soft. He stood up, concerned.

Very slightly, Ella edged away from him.

His face went still, his eyes suddenly intense and searching, as though he’d seen a flash of a striped tail disappear into the dark and was currently looking for the rest of the tiger. 

Ella touched the cross at her neck, the action reflexive and without thought. She rolled it somewhat absently between her fingers, and bit her lip, the gears in her mind visibly turning.

“Oh,” Lucifer said.

Perhaps mercifully, Chloe chose that moment to return. She didn’t knock either, and like Ella, she immediately got the vibe from the room that she should have.

In his mind, Lucifer was miserably writing out a new chapter of his book “How to Lose Friends (a guide to terrifying the ones you love)” Chapter 803: Ella Lopez.


	2. Chapter 2

The atmosphere of the room felt strange when Chloe entered the lab. There was a slap of shock and fear on Ella’s face that Chloe didn’t understand. Then she looked at Lucifer, and knew exactly what was going on. Chloe had seen that look on Lucifer’s face before. She had put that look on Lucifer’s face before. Ella somehow knew who he was, and her judgement of him, of his real self, was hanging in the air. Lucifer was waiting for the hammer to fall, and expecting it to land on his heart.

Chloe’s reaction to first seeing Lucifer’s devil face was a memory both she and Lucifer went through a lot of emotional effort to avoid thinking about. It wasn’t the wisest way to go about dealing with betrayal in a relationship. However, due to family issues, neither one of them had access to the playbook for emotionally healthy relationships.

Edging around a problem while side-eying it was, however, something from their own personal playbook, so that was what they both went with. Their personal playbook was titled ‘An Idiot’s Guide to Taking Four Years to Tell Someone You Love Them’, and it was not filled with particularly good advice. However, Lucifer had included some rather fun diagrams regarding sexual positions in the margins.

Chloe spoke cautiously. “Lucifer?” She didn’t ask directly, just in case she was wrong, but he knew exactly what she meant.

“I believe Miss Lopez has finally accepted that I am not a method actor,” Lucifer replied.

Chloe was not a perfect person, but she’d been Lucifer’s partner for a long time. Protecting him was something she knew how to do like she knew how to breathe. She suddenly felt like she was standing on solid ground for the first time in a while.

She stepped directly in between Lucifer and Ella.

Ella looked up at her, as if Chloe had just appeared out of thin air. “Chloe,” she said, her eyes huge. She grabbed at Chloe’s sleeve. “I’m not crazy, I swear, but he’s actually, like, actually…”

“The Devil,” Chloe finished. “I know. I’ve known for a while.”

Ella stared at her with her mouth open. “But-”

Ella was about to say something hurtful that couldn’t be taken back. Ella was not currently thinking about tact. Ella was thinking that the Devil had once, with great enthusiasm, helped her and about ten other girls into purple sequined showgirl costumes and spent much more time than he’d needed to doing up her spangly bra top in the back.

“Ella, don’t say another word,” Chloe’s voice was definite. ‘I-am-in-charge’ voice.

Ella’s mouth snapped shut.

“I want you to go home,” Chloe continued, patiently. “Right now.”

Lucifer stared at Chloe with a faint look of confusion. He had gone through the ‘friendship turns to pure terror in 10 seconds or less’ moment with people. Lucifer hadn’t ever had someone intercede on his behalf before. Despite the old adage, and what pedantic people who liked to argue with each other on the internet claimed, people did not often decide to be the actual Devil’s advocate.

It was an effect some people never got the chance to understand; Seeing someone stand up for you when you couldn’t stand up for yourself was a wonderful feeling, like watching love unfold in real life.

Lucifer let out a breath, touched.

Despite there being no actual improvement in what he was wearing, on the ‘Emotional Scale of Snappy Dressing’, Lucifer had suddenly gone from a three to a five. There was a base layer of obvious misery that affected the rating system.

Ella’s eyes went from Chloe, to Lucifer standing behind her.

Chloe shifted herself to stay dead center in Ella’s eye line.

“Ella,” Chloe said, with the careful cautiousness of someone trying to put down an irritated cat whose claws had gotten stuck in their sweater, “I’m serious. You should leave, and we’ll talk later. I’ll tell everyone you’re sick, ok? We’re not doing this here.”

“We’re not doing this in front of Lucifer’ is what Chloe meant. She didn’t say it, but Lucifer figured it out just from the tone of her voice.

Chloe was also thinking that she was going to need to bring Ella some margarita mix and tequila and get her therapeutically smashed before she did something stupid like go to church and accidentally set a lunatic priest after Lucifer with a blowtorch or something.

She did not say that either, but Lucifer didn't figure out that part. Which, given his insecurities, was probably a good thing.

Chloe put her hand on Ella’s shoulder and sort of gently steered her toward the door. Ella was one of the most responsive people to physical reassurance living in the greater Los Angeles area, so almost as soon as Chloe touched her, Ella grabbed her arm.

Some situations in life could not be approached like a rational human being. No person who believed rational things believed Lucifer was actually Lucifer until they did, and they instantly regretted finding out. The problem Ella was having was that she did believe irrational things, she just believed the wrong irrational things, so while she was feeling what anyone would when faced with the fact that she was friends with the Devil, she was also feeling a little stupid.

“I just thought he had superpowers,” She said breathlessly.

Chloe stopped dead. She glanced at Lucifer with a silent ‘what the hell?’ on her face. Lucifer was wearing a similar expression.

Chloe didn’t know it, but she would have had an easier time figuring it out at the closest comic book store.

“Wait, what?” Chloe said, squinting in confusion.

Ella generally spoke at high speed when agitated. She hadn’t been this agitated since high school, when she’d stolen a red 1965 Ford Mustang convertible and accidentally crashed it into the Joe Lewis memorial in the middle of Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It was shaped like a massive fist. Ella had almost been the last person Joe Lewis ever knocked out.

“It was my earbuds,” Ella said, as if it was an easily understandable answer to the question.

Then, for some reason, Ella started telling a story about how, six months ago, she’d dropped her earbuds behind the shelving unit in her lab. The story took a surprising amount of time to tell and didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.

Chloe folded her arms. Lucifer came up beside her and put his hands into his pockets. They glanced at each other, then back at Ella. Lucifer leaned in. “I may have broken Miss Lopez,” he said, quietly.

Ella kept going. Apparently, the day Ella had lost her earbuds, Lucifer had come into her lab, and she started to recount the conversation.

Lucifer held up a hand to stop her. “Yes, all right Miss Lopez. I know we talked, I was there. I moved the shelves, you got your earbuds back, happy ending.”

Ella blinked rapidly several times at being directly addressed.

Lucifer smiled and glanced at Chloe after the last two words left his mouth. A ‘happy ending’ joke was on deck.

“No,” Chloe said firmly, reading his mind and crushing his dreams.

At their exchange Ella relaxed a little. The fact that Chloe and Lucifer were acting the same as they always did put a pin to her rapidly expanding bubble of anxiety.

There was some weight to the theory that the more open to weirdness a person was, the more existential shocks that person could take. Ella had seen and done some weird shit. She’d once worn an Elvis costume as a joke to a party in Las Vegas, and ended up having a threesome with two other Elvis impersonators. There had been loose sequins in unspeakable places.

Lucifer knew that story. He’d put it on his ‘must try’ list, and Ella had snickered about it with him at a crime scene like a couple of 12 year olds. Like friends.

“You pulled the shelving unit out to get the earbuds,” Ella said to Lucifer, without quite meeting his eyes. “This unit weighs like 500 pounds with all the equipment on it. You moved it with one hand.”

Chloe suddenly understood the point of the story.

“Well, you’re welcome for the assist,” Lucifer said. “And congratulations for noticing,” Lucifer added, with a magnanimous nod of his head.

Ella didn’t look thrilled at the complement.

Lucifer looked thoughtful. “Granted, it’s not like I keep it a secret that I’m the devil, but no one else has ever noticed anything. So, credit where credit’s due, well done Miss Lopez.”

Ella had reasoned that at some point she would talk to Lucifer about the stuff he could do, but not in the context of ‘I am literally Satan’. It wasn’t so much a disappointment as it was that moment in every twilight zone episode where the normal story turns on a dime and next thing you know an ape monster is tearing apart the wing of the plane outside William Shatner’s window.

“Why didn’t you say something, Ella?” Chloe asked, shaking her head.

“I didn’t think he was the actual devil.” Ella said to Chloe through her teeth, as if by speaking that way Lucifer wouldn’t hear her. Her eyes widened and slid left, in a way that indicated she’d thought the idea was ridiculous. “I thought maybe the whole Lucifer thing was like his secret identity. You know, something to throw people off.”

Ella looked vaguely like she did while discussing a case with them, all expressive gestures. “I mean he’s got that crazy thing he can do with his brain to make suspects confess, so I thought yeah, obviously he has powers, he’s gotta be some kind of secret superhero on the side.”

She looked at Chloe as if she expected her to agree. “And I mean like, if a guy is a superhero that’s kind of his own business, right? I didn’t want to out him or anything.”

Lucifer opened his mouth and left it open, his eyebrows going up high.

He glanced at Chloe, struck speechless.

Chloe had her mouth pressed into a tight line, and the moment she met his eyes she realized the terrible possibility that she was going to start laughing. She was picturing Lucifer in a blue spandex Superman costume.

“Yeah, ok,” Chloe said, coughing the laugh out of her voice. “That seems...that seems reasonable. Yeah.” Chloe could imagine Trixie growing up to be something like Ella someday. Chloe did not know the Elvis Sex story.

She looked over at Lucifer and was surprised at his reaction. She expected him to be laughing, or maybe some flavor of outraged. She wasn’t even close.

He had a quiet little smile on his face, as though someone had given him a present.

Lucifer tilted his head, his expression soft. “I think it’s a rather lovely thought, to be honest,” he said. He could not recall if anyone had ever believed what he could do was real and assumed it meant he was good.

Lucifer looked down at Ella affectionately. “Thank you for that, Miss Lopez.”

Ella was the first person that he was aware of who held that kind of optimistic opinion about him, but she was not the only one in existence. Trixie also thought along similar lines. Trixie, however, simply believed that the Devil was a hero and always had been, and anyone who thought otherwise just hadn’t been raised right. Trixie actually had a few drawings she had made when she was younger, of the Devil wearing a cape, though nothing with blue spandex.

“Uh. Sure.” Ella said eloquently, in response. She suspected that the next time she went to church for confession she was going to have some big goddamn moral issues to settle with herself. Did you need to confess picking up an extra donut for the Devil on your way to work in the morning? Did you need to confess that the Devil had thanked you for being nice?

The answer to both of these questions was no. The addendum to the second question was ‘unless the reason he thanked you was because you were nice enough to help him commit a felony’. Ella had actually done that for Lucifer, but she hadn’t confessed it at the time, because she didn’t feel bad about it. She still didn’t feel bad about it; Her questions were more of a theological nature. If Ella had to confess every felony she’d ever committed she would be in church all day.

Chloe put her hand on Ella’s shoulder. “Go on home,” she said kindly. “If you have any questions or you just want to talk, you can call me, or Linda.” She hesitated. “In fact, you should definitely talk to Linda, she can answer any questions you have better than I can.”

Chloe opened her arms slightly, and Ella briefly clung to her, hugging her hard. Her heart was beating very fast. “Leap of faith, Ella,” Chloe said quietly, just for her ear.

She pulled back and looked up at Chloe, teary-eyed. Ella swallowed and nodded. She hesitated at the door, looking back at Lucifer.

“You...went to church with me,” Ella said quietly. She said it as though she’d just found out the friend she’d taken to the beach couldn’t swim, and had just come along for the company.

“I did,” Lucifer said with a nod, his expression soft.

Ella looked down at the floor. “Ok,” she said, and left.

The door shut behind her, and Chloe sighed in relief. It had gone better than she could have ever expected it to go. Lucifer exchanged a glance with her, feeling precisely the same.

Their situation in regards to the possible invasion of earth by hordes of demons hadn’t changed. Neither Chloe or Lucifer understood why, but they suddenly both felt a little better about their ability to face it.

It was an interesting phenomena; Sometimes a relatively straightforward, relatively familiar problem, like assembling Ikea furniture, can be comforting to someone who knows they have a complex problem ahead of them, like inventing and building a fully functional Warp Drive.

This analogy was regrettably apt as to the relative levels of difficulty of Chloe and Lucifer’s current problem.

Lucifer leaned back against one of the tables against the wall, looking at the floor. Wordlessly, Chloe leaned on the table beside him. After a moment, she bumped his shoulder with hers.

It wasn’t something either one of them was consciously aware of, but the conversation with Ella had brought up a facet of their relationship that was uniquely theirs. Like Lucifer, Chloe was familiar with being ostracized. Metaphorically speaking, the two of them were children with similar ‘kick me’ signs on their back, who took turns squaring off with the kids responsible. They didn’t manage to get the ‘kick me’ signs off each other, but a lot of people wear ‘kick me’ signs their whole life and never have anyone at their back to face down the kids who put it there, so Chloe and Lucifer were relatively lucky.

Neither of them really thought about it in so many words, but Lucifer had just been thrown into the emotional equivalent of a ‘kick me’ situation, and Chloe had had his back.

They’d known how to be partners a long time before they figured out how to be anything else.

Lucifer looked down at her affectionately. He slid his arm out, so that it was behind her, and she slid closer to him, leaning on his chest a little.

“I was thinking,” Chloe said. “Why don’t I duck out too, and I can take you home.”

Lucifer looked down at her with slightly exaggerated shock. “No paperwork?” He smiled a little. “Detective, are you feeling alright?”

Chloe looked at him seriously for a moment. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Yeah, I’m fine.” For the first time in a while, Chloe was actually telling the truth. She could tell that he knew; He looked like he’d suddenly gotten lighter. Lucifer hugged her a little closer with one arm.

He glanced at the door. “It might be best to give Doctor Linda some time to prepare for Miss Lopez.”

Chloe nodded. “I’ll call her. Maybe she’s heard from Amenadiel.”

They had a vague idea of what they were going to try to do in the attempt to save humanity. A small outline of a plan. A planlet.

She stood up, tugging lightly at his arm. “Come on,” She smiled, “I’ll even drop you off.”

Lucifer’s eyebrows lifted. “We came here together in my car.”

Chloe scrunched her mouth up and nodded soberly. "Guess we'll have to go to your place, then." Chloe tucked her hair behind one ear. "We'll have time to strategize." She raised her eyebrows. "With everything going on, I asked Dan to take Trixie for the rest of the week."

It was not a hint; It was more like a flashing neon sign.

Lucifer blinked at her, then brightened enormously. He looked her up and down. " _Oh_. Well." He gestured, obviously delighted. "In that case, lead the way, Detective."

As they walked through the precinct, Chloe got out her phone, thinking to call Linda.

She wished for a second that Amenadiel wasn't off trying to talk to his brothers. It had done Chloe a lot of good to actually see an angel and hear him say ‘my brother Luci’ with fondness in his voice. Maybe if she’d been able to talk to him sooner things would have gone differently.

Amenadiel also wished he was there, for different reasons. Amenadiel was currently taking a pass over the borders of hell. Things were a lot more dangerous now than the last time he’d done it, given that the demons probably no longer feared his brother, so probably wouldn’t think much at all of going after him.

It was more of a recon mission, since he suspected if he had any trouble, Luci would be the only one willing to come and back him up. One of the hazards of being the father of the first half-angel baby in existence was that the rest of his family thought he’d lost his mind.

When the 'crazy' brother showed up at the front door and started claiming they needed to do something about hell or the earth would be destroyed, they treated him like someone trying to sell them a time share. It had been a really, really long time since heaven had given hell a good reason to be afraid. Trying to get his brothers and sisters to see that Hell might have forgotten that lesson was not working out so well. Before he went home and told Linda and Luci about it, he wanted to see just how worried they needed to be.

It was a fact that the borders of heaven and hell were the most mutable spaces anywhere. Any kind of change that would eventually echo through the rest of creation tended to start showing the effects there first.

These liminal spaces had no real identity of their own, so they took on the characteristics of whatever was passing through the fabric of creation at the moment; Rather like a New York City subway station platform about to receive several hundred unvaccinated people from Brooklyn with the measles.

Amenadiel happened to be the only creature in one of those liminal spaces at precisely the right time to see something extraordinary happen. Amenadiel didn’t know it was extraordinary. Amenadiel thought it looked like a boiling nightmare cloud was seeping into the space between worlds, and took off like a jackrabbit.

It was not a boiling nightmare cloud. It was the signing of a real estate agreement. The universe had just won the most important dice game of all time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is general/non-graphic discussion of sex in this chapter, but no sex happening, so I'm thinking the rating is okay as-is

Chloe and Lucifer probably should have been worried about Amenadiel, but since they had no idea what was going on at the edges of heaven and hell, they weren’t. Even if Chloe had known what was going on, she thought he was safe in heaven. Lucifer also thought Amanadiel was in heaven, but if he’d been asked, he would have cast some doubt on the word ‘safe’.

Amanadiel was taking a bit longer than they’d expected and he hadn’t called Linda, but he hadn’t been on a strict timetable, either. They assumed they had a few hours, give or take, before they needed to maybe start wondering where he’d got to. Linda even optimistically thought it might be good news; His chat with his brothers and sisters in heaven might be going well. 

Or at least, better than the way Lucifer had said it would go. Loudly. Repeatedly. To everyone.

“There is not a chance in hell any one of those stuck-up monuments to heartlessness will lift a finger, and I would know,” Lucifer had insisted, along with several other things much less flattering.

So for all Chloe and Lucifer knew, they had a golden opportunity to be productive and strategize during this brief period of slack water, before the mother of all high tides. The water, in this metaphor, being the amount of demons that would undoubtedly be trying to beat the crap out of them.

They spent the time responsibly, by having a productively impressive amount of sex.

At the moment, the two of them were not in the process of actually having sex. They were sprawled awkwardly on the bed, trying to catch their breath. Lucifer was thinking, in a rather dazed fashion, that he would have liked to go out to the balcony for a smoke if his legs still worked.

They both felt rather strange and edgy and trapped in their own skin. They had slept with each other several times already. That was more or less the problem.

There was a certain kind of sex that someone could only have when they loved who they were with. It was not the only kind of sex that two people in love could have, but in order to have this particular kind of sex, love was the limiting reagent. It could only happen while the love was present. It was like the iron oxide in a thermite reaction, except sexier.

It was not an easy kind of sex, not lighthearted or freeing. It was not even, strictly speaking, all that pleasant. Regardless of that, once a person has had this particular brand of i-love-you sex, it was burned into their brain forever. It would carve itself into the dark corners of their desires. It was sexual crack cocaine. If they could have it every day all day, they would. And like crack cocaine, it would probably kill them.

If someone has never experienced this kind of sex, getting them to understand it was a little like trying to explain English grammar to an elephant; There were several natural barriers to communicating effectively. 

A vague and incomplete instruction manual for someone trying to experience this kind of sex would advise that the people involved should start by locating the terrible ache in their heart that can be felt when they are actively loving and longing for someone, and amplify it 20 times until both the pain and pleasure of it completely consumes them. Next, they must attach the mad howling thing that is now their heart directly to whatever sexual parts they possess, look straight into the eyes of the person they are longing for with every single screaming cell of their body, and have sex with them. Then, while having sex with them, they must attempt to rip their soul from their body and shove it into their partner’s soul using willpower alone. 

In this situation the desire for sex was a trick. The goal of this trick was to make the people involved think that sex would bring them close enough to each other to stop the desperation currently in full control of their bodies. 

It wouldn’t. Everyone having that kind of sex eventually realized they would never be close enough. The feeling would sink into their skin. They would recall it years later like a silent howl of longing, and despite how overwhelming even the memory of it was, they would crave it like a drowning man craves air.

The instruction manual for this type of sex would not sell very well.

That was unfortunate, because this type of sex was an uncommon but natural result of loving a partner, whether they had an instruction manual or not. Like the first awkward introduction to their partner’s parents, it was a product of the process that most people would eventually encounter. A fairly average person with a fairly average ability to love people might have this kind of sex three or four times in their life. 

Chloe and Lucifer have had this kind of sex three times in the last hour and a half. 

They were completely wrecked. Despite that, Lucifer was silently calculating how quickly, given his usual turnaround time, that they could try doing it again. 

Chloe, having loved averagely in the past, had experienced this type of sex once, previous to Lucifer. It had been the sort of sex that would convince a slightly douche-y man to propose to someone on the spot, and for that someone to agree immediately before thinking things through. It was powerful stuff.

Before that afternoon, despite having been alive essentially since the beginning of time, Lucifer had experienced this type of sex exactly zero times. Lucifer had never been in love with anyone before, so he’d been missing a key ingredient in the metaphorical thermite reaction. 

At the moment, Lucifer was face down on the bed, and vaguely realized that he was half-laying on Chloe’s legs, pinning her down. He had not only never experienced anything like what they had been doing, he’d never even imagined it was a possibility to explore. It wasn’t a fluke; It had happened three separate times in one afternoon. He was suddenly fumbling with the idea of an entirely new genre of sex. 

Lucifer was having a little trouble processing, which was understandable. An hour and a half ago he hadn’t even known thermite existed. 

Chloe was half off the bed, her face and left arm hanging over the edge. “Whew,” she said, in an admiring manner. She hadn’t even noticed that Lucifer had accidentally pinned her down on the bed. Her heart was going like gangbusters. “Ok, that was something else,” Chloe said, meaning ‘that was surprisingly fantastic’. She was just about as impressed as she’d ever been about anything.

Lucifer made an unintelligible sound of agreement, his face pressed into the sheets. 

They both felt like they’d been running full out toward each other and smacked heart-first into a sliding glass door. Repeatedly. Despite how ludicrous it sounded, both of them felt- with every fiber of their being- that it was a fantastic and innovative new way to get through a glass door.

The I-love-you sex they had been having made it very clear that it wasn’t possible to get as close to each other as they wanted to be. It also made them want to keep trying until they either passed out, had a heart attack, or needed to get up to make a sandwich.

Lucifer rolled over onto his back, scooting clear of Chloe’s legs and nearly falling off the bed. His casual charm had taken a bit of a blow, along with some of his sexual confidence. 

Chloe got a good grip on the sheets and hauled herself up off the edge of the bed, flopping down next to him. She had the intention of getting close and being some flavor of affectionate. Chloe lifted her hand rather limply and patted at the bed until she located him, and then threw her arm over him without otherwise moving. Her hair was in her mouth, and she made several breathy spitting efforts to get it out.

“Is this what sex is like for you all the time?” Lucifer asked with a hint of disbelief. 

Chloe made a muffled sound into the pillows. 

The sound was Chloe saying, “I _wish_ ,” but Lucifer couldn’t quite understand her.

“How do you manage? Why would you ever even get out of bed?” Lucifer continued, half talking to himself.

Lucifer was very accustomed to casual, fun, unemotional sex. This was as far outside his wheelhouse as a train conductor trying to fly the Millennium Falcon. 

There was something in his voice that made Chloe lift her head. He had a confused, soft kind of light in his eyes, like a small boy given a puppy he hadn’t asked for. Chloe found it a little heartbreaking, the way he never knew how to deal with purely emotion-based affection. Emotion-based sex, she realized, was taking things to another level. 

“Hey,” Chloe said, gently. She slid over and curled up against him. “Hey, it’s okay.”

Lucifer let out a breath and his arm came up, holding her close to his side. He shifted a little, getting comfortable, sort of tucking her head underneath his chin. Lucifer held her very tightly for a moment, and she grabbed onto him like her arms were the only thing keeping him from falling back to hell. 

At this point, Lucifer thought, if he ever went back it would be because his father put him there and no one would be strong enough to keep him from falling. She would try though, and even if it made no sense, he found that comforting. Someone would try. Someone would miss him.

Lucifer was not aware of how slim the chances were of his father ever placing him anywhere, ever again. He had not met the new boss, and was unfamiliar with Standards and Practices regarding fairness, having been a servant in a family establishment for all of time. 

Chloe stroked her hand over his chest, long smooth movements of her hand. Lucifer rubbed her arm from her shoulder to her elbow and back up, in a soothing motion. They’d figured out about an hour ago that something about the physical sensation made it easier to accept that they were separate from each other. Somehow, being touched that way felt like saying ‘this is you, this is you in your own skin and that isn’t so bad, now, is it’.

It was pretty bad. But the longer they sort of petted at each other the better it got; Like a couple of irritable cats getting some attention on the sofa. If they had been a couple of irritable cats, Lucifer would have been horrified, due to his complete hatred of cats.

“I have to admit, this is...” Lucifer hesitated, “...stranger than I was expecting.” He spoke softly, meaning ‘I have feelings so I am freaking out’. 

Lucifer, of course, would never admit that. It would take five sessions with Doctor Linda for him to be willing to insist it was Chloe who was freaking out, and another week for him to wreck his own life trying to prove it.

Chloe gave him a dry look. “Thanks,” Chloe said, sarcastically. 

Lucifer lifted his head and looked down at her thoughtfully. “Are you sure you’re human?”

That question didn’t have any hidden meaning, except that to an outside observer, it was obvious that Lucifer was almost too stupid to live when it came to navigating romantic relationships.

Chloe tilted her head back to look at him, somewhat incredulous. “Is this your idea of pillow talk? ‘Are you human’?” She pressed her lips together and scrunched up her nose. “Because if so, I gotta say, it’s not really working for you.”

Lucifer gave her a look like she’d jumped up and started to tap dance across the top of his piano. “Please, don’t be ridiculous. I’m a master at pillow talk. This is just me…” he made a vague gesture, “processing.”

“Hmm,” Chloe said doubtfully. She put an elbow onto the bed, and rested her head on her hand, getting a good look at his face. He looked nervy as hell.

She frowned at him, feeling a twinge of concern. Chloe was trying to treat him more carefully, given how rough things were for him at the moment. Things were also rough for her, but the conversation with Ella had awakened her protective instincts. Chloe didn’t know how to fight something as big as Hell, but she did know how to look after people. 

She could be upset later, she told herself, lying.

Lucifer had arrived back from hell wild-eyed and distraught, looking like a raw exposed nerve. He’d been gone less than a week, but given the expression on his face when he’d first laid eyes on her, it had been about ten thousand years. Even before he told her, she could see that it was all he could take. She knew that look in his eye. The look that meant he was right on the edge, and the ground was crumbling under his feet.

Lucifer saw the expression on her face and sighed loudly. He saw Chloe’s concern as doubt, mostly due to his own insecurities.

A demonstration of his talent, Lucifer thought, was necessary. “All right, very well, you asked for it.” 

Lucifer rolled onto his side and rested his head on his hand, mirroring Chloe’s position. He draped his arm over his hip. It was a pleasantly feminine piece of body language. The casual position made it suddenly feel like Chloe was at a sleepover, back when she was a kid, sharing stupid secrets. 

Lucifer had a gleam in his eye. He leaned toward her, opened his mouth, and froze.

Chloe raised her eyebrows, patiently.

“Ah,” he said, leaning back. He looked slightly crestfallen. “I would ask you what you desire, but that doesn’t work on you.”

She rolled her eyes. Of course he thought he was smooth, he used his powers on everyone. “You could just ask, like anyone would.”

Lucifer gave her an appraising look, amused. He gave her a nudge with his arm. “Go on, then,” he said lightly, “surely there must be something you-”

“This,” Chloe replied, almost instantly. “This is just about perfect.”

Lucifer looked very young all of a sudden. He smiled, something bright in his eyes. A few strands of Chloe’s hair were still in her face, and Lucifer reached out and brushed them off her forehead. 

Lucifer somehow managed to look like he was both utterly smitten and completely shitting himself at the same time. This was because that was exactly what he was doing. It was accidentally charming. In fact, it was much more effective at charming Chloe than any of his deliberate attempts had ever been. 

Lucifer was not aware of it, but entirely separate from the smoothness of his deliberate game, he had grown (through his association with Chloe), some of the most adorable accidental game of anyone in Los Angeles. 

“‘This’...” Lucifer pointed at her, and then back at himself. A ‘you and me’ gesture. “It feels different.” Lucifer was giving her a serious expression. He was thinking that he wanted to watch her forever, looking charmed by him even though he had no sway over her. He was thinking about the sensation of almost being close enough to her. Almost. 

Chloe chewed on her lip for a moment. “Good different?” She asked, giving him an encouraging look. She’d heard him make some very high pitched and appreciative sounds during the sex in question, which had been gratifying, so she was pretty confident about the answer. She just wanted to make sure. He could be fragile sometimes. Given his life, it was understandable.

Lucifer had spent his first night back in the world drinking heavily and clinging to her while pretending very hard that he wasn’t clinging to her.

Chloe wanted to protect him, as weak as her efforts might be. Once again, she was harder on herself than she needed to be.

“That's a bit of an understatement, but yes. It felt like...” Lucifer’s smile faded, and he looked at her with something sweeter and more serious than happiness, “...like I love you, and you love me.” He let out a breath, like he couldn’t believe his luck.

He still looked like himself, but something jagged and tense had dropped away. Something that put age on his face and was so much a part of him that Chloe hadn’t even realized it was there.

Lucifer did not, in fact, physically age. He’d aged, regardless. Layers of hurt and habitual suspicion had hardened him, made him sharp and liable to cut. Chloe didn’t know it, but she’d just gotten a general sense of what he’d looked like before hell. Before he’d seen and done things that made that kind of simple open-heartedness impossible.

Chloe did know that Lucifer kept a lot of armor between himself and the world. It looked like he’d misplaced it. He looked _sweet_ , for god’s sake. Chloe thought that the Lucifer she’d first met would have thrown himself into traffic in horror if he’d been able to see what the future had done to him.

Chloe was incorrect. He would have been fascinated. Not in the way Mr. Spock was fascinated by new life and new civilizations; More like the way a little crab was fascinated by an anglerfish’s glowing lure, right before it got eaten. By the time Lucifer had first met Chloe, Los Angeles had already gotten its hooks into him. He was already changing into the man he would become. Maze had taken a little longer to win over, but Los Angeles was relentless, and had gotten to her eventually. 

Chloe reached out and brushed her hand down his arm. “Yeah, I love you,” Chloe said gently.

His eyes brightened with a smile that she wanted to keep in her pocket and pull out whenever she was sad.

Lucifer had always wanted to be loved for who he was. Always. There were times when he had been too hurt and hardened to admit it, but the desire was always there. If Lucifer had known earlier that one of the main things he’d needed to get his deepest desire was to actually admit to himself that he wanted it...he still would have been too terrified to admit it. In fact, he probably would have run in the other direction and blamed his father for giving him feet to run with. Sometimes the only way through a terrible coping mechanism was to beat it to death with a large stick and a therapist. 

Chloe raised her eyebrows. “I thought the sex part was a pretty clever indication of that, actually.” She gave him a patently fake look of seriousness. 

“Was it?” He honestly looked curious.

Chloe raised her eyebrows in an ‘are you kidding me’. “Yeah, Lucifer.”

“Well,” Lucifer said slowly, as if he was trying to figure out a magic trick. “I suppose that’s not my area of expertise.”

Chloe was getting a crick in her neck, so she rolled onto her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. “What do you mean?” She asked, squinting a little in confusion. 

Chloe decided not to point out that given Lucifer’s vast, vast, _vast_ amount of experience, if he wasn’t an expert at sex by now no one was. She set the comment down on the table next to her insecurities. 

It was probably a wise decision. Lucifer had actually had more sex in the last year than Chloe had in her lifetime. However, Lucifer was an outlier and his sexual experience should not have been counted against anyone else’s.

Lucifer lifted a hand and started to absently stroke her back. It was a silent and completely unconscious statement of affection.

“Sex hasn’t ever made me, you know,” Lucifer hesitated, “feel things.” His expression had turned extraordinarily soft, and his eyes were moving over her face. He continued to run his hand over her back. “It’s rather lovely.”

As far as emotion-based sex went, Chloe thought he was learning pretty fast, whether he knew it or not.

“Huh,” Chloe said. “Lucifer, loving who you’re with... It happens. It’s normal.” 

“Not for me,” Lucifer said frankly. It was a statement of fact; There wasn’t any particular emotion behind it; He might have been commenting on the weather. It was, for a normal human, kind of weird, but then Lucifer was the Devil, so ‘kind of weird’ came with the package. 

After a pause for thought, a slight hint of unease crept onto his face that might have made someone who knew him (someone who had once personally interviewed almost a hundred individual people Lucifer had had sex with) think that Lucifer understood very well that he was missing something. He looked rather like someone who suspected they had just lost their phone.

Lucifer frowned, as if to say ‘I swear I put it down on the table just a second ago’.

“That actually doesn’t sound terribly flattering, does it?”

“I mean…” Chloe made a vaguely sympathetic face. "Not so much."

Chloe was right; Lucifer had realized he was missing something. In had happened in the most painful way imaginable. He’d been faced with the fact that he couldn’t give something to Chloe that she needed. It had taken him seeing Chloe with someone else, seeing the reality of losing her, to crystallize the idea in his mind that he needed something more, too. He hadn’t realized it would translate so effectively to sex.

“I only meant,” Lucifer added quickly, “that you’re special.” He looked thoughtful. “Love does make a difference. Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed at those Hallmark movies.”

Chloe snorted.

“I'm joking,” Lucifer continued almost immediately, without any change in tone. “They’re an atrocity to good taste everywhere.” He had one of those slightly wide-eyed smiles on his face that meant he thought he was being witty. He tilted his head. “Though, when you need to stay awake for over a week, you’d be surprised what you’re willing to watch.”

In the Hallmark movie starring Lucifer and Chloe, Lucifer had almost been the idiot who took the heroine for granted and then lost her in the last thirty minutes of the film to a lying, scheming, immortal rat-bastard who definitely didn’t deserve her. Or so Lucifer had thought during that week.

Chloe stared at him for a moment. “There are a lot of crazy things you’ve done over the years that weren’t actually all that crazy, aren’t there,” she said slowly.

“I would like to dispute ‘crazy’,” he said, lifting his eyebrows and giving her a pointed look. He was not thinking of his ex-wife Candy, because he was telling himself that he wasn’t. “But yes, I imagine there are a few things that might make more sense to you now,” he gestured vaguely, “in context, so to speak.”

This was a facet of the fact that Lucifer was the Devil that she hadn’t considered. After she’d seen his face, she’d spent ages going over things in her mind to try and figure out if what Lucifer had said and done were lies. If Lucifer was an evil manipulator or the man she knew. She hadn’t really focused on anything else. And then, after what she’d done when she’d seen him again, she’d been leery to ask him about anything at all.

He’d always told her the truth. The _actual_ truth. Something had happened during the week he hadn’t been able to sleep, and she had no idea what it was. He’d probably told her outright, but she couldn’t even remember, because she’d dismissed it as some kind of jealous breakdown. There were a lot of things like that, scattered through their past together. Some of them even involved saving her life. 

Chloe was having a sudden pang of conscience.

“Once this thing with Hell is over, we’re gonna have to go over a few things,” she said, hiding her feelings magnificently.

Lucifer’s expression went very still. It was more of an absence of expression. It still managed to strongly convey the message that Lucifer was bracing himself, expecting something bad to happen. It was his eyes that gave him away; He was terrified, and did not hide it magnificently.

It was regrettable that Chloe was thinking too hard about her own feelings to notice. She was not, as previously stated, a perfect person. Luckily, her conscience was formidable and prodded her to add to her previous statement, in the interest of complete honesty.

“It's just, I probably owe you a couple of ‘thank you’s,” she admitted.

Lucifer blinked at her for a moment. A smile flickered over his face. He tilted his head her way. “What was that?” he asked, cupping his ear as if he hadn’t heard.

Chloe smothered a smile. “I probably owe you some ‘thank you’s,” she repeated. ‘You ass’, she did not add, and leaned in towards him.

He looked very smug right up until he realized she was going to kiss him.

Chloe had kissed Lucifer both when she knew he was the Devil, and before, when she thought he wasn’t. Real Devil or slightly unbalanced nightclub owner claiming to be the Devil, he kissed the same. 

Lucifer melted in her arms, going gentle and tender in an instant. He was shockingly earnest, his whole attention on the moment, as if it was a matter of life or death that he remember everything. Lucifer Morningstar kissed like he was offering her his whole heart on a plate. Chloe knew he was the type of person who spent a lot of his time and energy tangled up in his own head. Suddenly, something about him relaxed and went very still; Like a thousand feet of murky water had settled so completely it looked like five. Crystal clear, right down to the bottom.

For a long moment everything was close and warm and frankly fantastic. At some point Lucifer reached up and cupped her cheek in his hand, his fingers sliding back into her hair. When she pulled back he leaned forward, eyes still shut, like he was chasing the tail end of the kiss.

Lucifer stopped himself, but looked at her as if to say ‘please come back’.

In addition to his accidental game, Lucifer unknowingly had a knack for getting his hand around Chloe’s heart and tugging her towards the things he cared about. Things that she otherwise might have considered to be foolish or overly impulsive.

“You know, I’m thinking,” Chloe pressed her lips together tightly, her chin jutting out, looking thoughtful in a slightly childish way. She nodded to herself. “Since this is all new to you, we should probably have a lot more sex.” She looked very serious. “So you can get used to what it’s like,” she smiled, “with this whole ‘feeling-things’ thing.”

Lucifer let out a breath of laughter. He gave her a brief, admiring look.

Then he put a knee to the bed, applied some leverage, and kissed her right onto her back with well-practiced ease. The moment he did, his heart squeezed tight and swallowed him whole.

They were going to die in this bed, Chloe thought with some hysteria. She would never be close enough to him and would never stop trying and therefore they were just going to have to accept an awkward and embarrassing death.

Luckily for them, that wasn’t going to happen. Maze saved them from that fate with a phone call. Unluckily, they weren’t going to like hearing anything she was about to tell them.

A slightly tinny version of ‘Black Magic Woman’ started playing from the night stand. Lucifer and Chloe both froze. If it was Maze calling, it was important. Vital, possibly.

Lucifer said Maze’s name like a curse. He pushed himself up and crawled across the sheets to reach his phone.

Chloe could not hear what Maze said, but she saw Lucifer’s face turn grim.

“Yes,” he said. Then, “No, bring him here. We’ll need space to work on him.”

Lucifer looked at Chloe. “She’s got one.” 

Maze had found a demon. In actuality, Maze had found four demons, but there was only one left alive. She’d told Lucifer, but Lucifer neglected to relay that particular detail to Chloe. He did this out of hope, that she might somehow be better off or safer if she didn’t know about the bloody, gritty things that would have to be done. This was a very stupid idea to have. However, it played nicely into his deep seated fears that Chloe might be disgusted, and afraid, and would run away and not come back this time. Therefore, Lucifer thought it was a great idea and simply told himself it was for a different reason.

Lucifer asked Maze how far away she was, and then hung up. He looked at Chloe.

He and Maze were going to torture that demon to death once she’d brought him there. The information they needed was important, so they were going to be thorough. It would be a lot messier than it had to be.

“You need to go,” he said flatly. He stood up from the bed and retrieved his robe, wrapping it brusquely around him. “You’ve got about thirty-five minutes until Maze gets here, so get a wriggle on.”

He was not, to be fair, attempting to sound like the sort of asshole who shags a girl and then immediately tosses her out. He was too busy being terrified of what might happen if Chloe was still there in thirty-five minutes.

Chloe did not suspect that he was speaking out of fear, because Lucifer had gone out of his way to tell her as little as possible about any unpleasant and terrifying details that might make him look like the sort of person who would do what he was about to do. The situation was ripe for misunderstanding.

“Wait. What?” Chloe said, her voice like ice.


End file.
